Beta 3 UX Improvements

Hi everybody, Max here. I posted before about "A New Look for IE” back when we released the beta 2 preview, and with the launch of beta 3, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about some of the new functionality we have added and changes we have made specifically related to your feedback.

First and foremost, let me thank everybody who has put the time and effort towards giving us feedback, whether it’s through our connect site, participating in our monthly online chats, talking with us at the conferences we attend, or even just commenting here on our blog; this helps us make the product better for you. Since beta 2, we’ve fixed many issues, and we continue to drive to releasing a more secure, reliable, easy to use browser with IE7.

New Icons

In response to feedback especially here on the blog and on Channel 9, we want to show you some new icons for beta 3.

We’ve lightened up the stop, refresh, and search icons, and we’ve changed the icons for the favourites center and add to favourites to give you back the good old favourites star.

Tab Reordering

The next big change we have made, which I’m super excited about as this was one of the more highly voted for issues on the connect site, is that in beta 3 you’re now able to reorder tabs via dragging!

Just drag the tab where you want it to go. This is a super convenient way to keep your tabs organized within your window.

Authenticated FTP

We also heard lots of feedback about FTP not working in IE7. In beta 2, anonymous FTP sites worked, however if the site required authentication, then one needed to either use windows explorer to get the familiar folder view of the FTP site, or use the somewhat arcane ftp://username:password@ftp.site/ URL format in order to make it work in IE7. In beta 3, IE7 now prompts for credentials and gives an html view of the FTP site. If you’re interested in the folder view for the FTP site, simply choose the “Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer” menu entry from the Page menu.

Easy Access to Email

Earlier in the IE7 development cycle, we decided to remove the command bar icon that provided access directly to one’s email. Through our Customer Support Services division, we learned that the lack of this icon was in fact one of the top call generators for IE7 beta 2, and hence we’ve added this icon back. It’s now available to be put into your command bar through the customization menu. Right click on the command bar and select Customize Command Bar -> Add or Remove Commands.

A smaller change

There’s one more change I want to tell you about, first because I think it’s a great example of a small detail that makes a big difference in how much people enjoy using the browser, and secondly because it was expertly done by one of our new summer interns, Michael Ritche.

IE6 featured auto scaling of large images to fit the browser window, and it had this weird button that would show up over the top of the image after some indeterminate amount of time. It felt a little odd to use, and was somewhat unpredictable. In IE7, thanks to Michael, we’ve replaced this with a simple magnification cursor. Now, you can click to zoom the image to full size, and the image will be centered on where you clicked.

This was a great first change by Michael, and we’re sure there will be many more.

Jane has posted details of some UX improvements in the RSS experience on the RSS team blog. Check them out.

As we look towards finishing IE7 and starting in our next release, please keep the feedback coming! With your help we’ll continue to improve Internet Explorer.

Darn (OK, not what I normally say), I liked the Beta 2 icons much better, at least for Refresh and Search – these ones look a bit insipid (the indicator for new search provider discovery used to light up proudly, now it looks like it’s powered by a dying flashlight battery). But since this change was in response to user feedback, that’s obviously just me.

A couple of enhancements that *would* be nice, in descending order of priority:

1) Some ability to expand the search box would be great, it’s a bit cramped – I think that will inhibit some people from using it (which is a shame because it’s an excellent feature)

2) The View Source display – I hate to say it, but Netscaope, Firefox and co have always provided a much better user experience for this, with a nicely formatted and somewhat syntax coloured display. Opening it in Notepad is, well, a bit naff.

I like the new icons and new functions. I noticed also that my "add mobile favorites" button has appropriately moved back on the page whereas under beta 2, it had been pushed onto a >> menu. Cool. Also, the overall experience seems snappier. Where there performance changes?

Great work! It won’t pull me away from Firefox (I use Linux a lot… and I LOVE Firefox), but it looks like you’re well on your way toward releasing a real browser. Kudos to the whole team for what must be a monumental effort. The web dev world salutes you!

It still has not been fixed. I’m still unable to actually reorder favorites located in sub-folders on the Links toolbar.

Also, since the reordering of tabs made it into IE7 when it was said that it was not going to be, is there any chance that the implementation of middle clicking a folder on the Links toolbar will open up all of those links in new tabs?

Have a beer on me. Between tabs (especially with reordering!), QuickTabs and the printing improvements alone, this is the best update since IE4. And we’ve even got Channels… ehm… FEEDS, yeah, FEEDS back 😉

I concur on the performance observations — snappiness is up all ’round. At least on my machine, it feels about as fast as IE6, which means it runs circles around FireFox.

Thanks for a great update.In the past i was using Opera then Firefox, but now i’m seriously switching back to new IE7 Beta 3. It’s looks very good and only feature i am missing is option to add separator between favorites.

Great job so far, but only one small detail I guess you forgot: pages that open in new windows are automatically resized to fit the whole IE screen size, but more conveniant is to let these pages to open in their own sizes (Firefox does this).

I’m not yet sure if it is a good or a bad thing that IE’s ux imitates Firefox (and yes, in some parts other ‘alternative’ browsers as well) more with every release.

Searchbox, tabbed browsing, feeds, cleaner ui … those where all innovative things that developers of other brothers came up with and IE was simply lacking after 5 years of non-development and I guess the IE team had more or less no choice to copy them. And you guys did a good job in most parts.

But all these new ‘minor’ changes are almost spooky. The image rezise feature was one, that was made popular by IE6 (well, because if its flawed ui not really that popular) but was caopied and improved by other browsers. And now IE7 beta 3 uses an absolutely identical way to deal with image rezising as Firefox does.

Tab reordering, another feature that works and looks almost identical to the same feature Firefox has had a long time ago.

Including weak and seriously flawed copy of Mozilla’s extenion and theme pages http://www.ieaddons.com I am really disappointed with IE7.

I know you guys had to catch up and I know it must have been quite hard. But I would have never thought that IE7’s ux would copy THAT much from other browsers without actually improving much and without any kind of innovative NEW features.

You guys must be getting real sick of it – I mean seriously, it’s like touching your finger to a hot frying pan everytime you post about improvements to IE7, someone HAS TO post about how you copied every other browser out there, and feature X works just like feature Y in browser Z.

IE7 has been terrific in it’s own right. Keep up the good work IE Team. The RSS feed management and capabilities of IE7 alone were enough to make me ditch Firefox. Sure, Firefox can do ‘live bookmarks’ but IE7 does it better.

@Christoph – instead of writing about how everything is copied from Firefox, why don’t you tell us some of those ‘innovative NEW features’ you had in mind?

@Newtronic – There were in fact many performance changes, and we continue to make progress here as we move to the final release.

@Nocturnal – you can reorder favourites that are in sub folders on the links toolbar provided you do this through the favourites center. We have the bug in our internal system that you can’t do this directly from the links toolbar, though I doubt we will be able to fix this for IE7. Hopefully the work around suits you

Ok, I must be doing something wrong. I’m going into favorites center, I’m going to the Link folder, then going into the sub-folder let’s say it’s called "Tech." I go ahead and re-arrange the links to how I’d like to view them. I close out the favorites center and then go to the folder that is located on the Links toolbar. I click on the folder, a list drops down. The list is still in alpha order and is not changed at all. Of course, if I go to the favorites center to check on this folder and the order it is in, it is in the exact order I have placed it. However, it doesn’t affect the actual folder on the Links toolbar. Is that what you meant by it was fixed but that there is still a bug with this?

Great improvements I must say, and the performance is definitely much more snappy than the previous Betas… I just hope the improvements continue.

A small glitch which has been overlooked I guess (I had filed a bug for this too)… The "Open a New Tab next to Current" does not work as intended. New tab is still opened at the end. Hope this gets fixed.

Hey, cool! A pic of my home town! Interesting angle for the pic too (must have been taken by someone in or on one of the offices south of the tower).

The zoom feature looks like a siginificant improvement. I am always frustrated by accidently killing the old resize toolbar, and then playing the game of move & wait to get it back (always seems to take a few rounds), but oddly, you can’t just turn it off or some sites start getting weird artifacts.

When will the ‘Image Toolbar’ make it’s transition back into IE7??????? it was always nice to be able to just click on ‘save’ or ‘print’ on that floating toolbar instead of having to right-click on the picture to do it.

Please make it come back, i’m lost without it.

Also, i know firefox does this (i can’t stand firefox), it would be nice if you could just ‘right-click’ on the webpage and instead of choosing ‘refresh’ choosing an option like ‘reload images’ or something like that which will reload all the images on a webpage that didn’t load due to internet connection lag etc…

Please don’t leave me hanging. All that I ask is you review my previous post in which I posted screen shots of what I’m trying to accomplish and tell me if that is the bug that you are confirming or if I’m doing something wrong. Thank you very much Max.

@Nocturnal – ok, I understand your issue now, it’s not what I thought you were talking about. Yes, I see your bug. I will log this into our database and investigate. I did try quickly and it seems like this bug also existed on IE6.

@Ronin – The "Open a new tab next to current" only applies when links are middle clicked or ctrl-clicked on the current page. They’ll open to the right of the current tab. Watch for another blog post coming soon that describes all of our tab behaviour for more details.

@Xepol – I was wondering when somebody was going to be able to identify the image (although you never actually named the city…) I didn’t take it from downtown though, I was actually pretty far away…

– Combine Refresh and Stop buttons into one, and make Go one single button.

– Make the search box resizeable.

– Integrate the Find on Page feature into the Search Box. So when the user presses Ctrl + F it highlights the search box, and arrows appear in the box to cycle through the key words on the page. Once the words are cleared from the box it goes back to the default search engine.

– Use icons consistent with Windows XP (IE6 icons perhaps?).

– Make quick search show only small icons (as in Beta 2), the large icons look blurry and dumb.

– Colour coding in the View Source window.

– Better standards support, comments on Digg.com still disappear in this Beta when they are expanded. Because some comments are dugg down they need to be expanded to be viewed, but IE7 doesn’t show them.

The whole point of dragable tabs is to get the tabs in the order you want. Well, if I save the tab group, it should also save the order, but instead it just tosses in the alphabetical ordering and restores that instead. You have to go into the favorites group and re-order them there, which makes the draggable tabs a truely wasted eye candy effort.

Of course, I am still lobbying to have the links toolbar let me re-order the contents of folders in my prefered order instead of ALWAYS having to accept the alphabetical ordering. This one really mystifies me since the IE team has had the code to do exactly this since nearly forever.

Ya, I’ll make sure they are reported as actual bugs.

Is it my imagination, or is the toolbar bigger? Maybe it is just the new horizontal lines that make it appear that way. I hate the new horizontal lines btw, they clutter the interface in a very ugly way. I’ll go digging for settings, but if there is no way to turn them off (as I expect), could you add a way in the next version?

I just installed IE 7.0 beta 3 and now program Microsoft CTF Loader(File Name: ctfmon.exe) is now running on startup and running on backtround. I know that this process was not running before. How do i stop Microsoft CTF Loader from starting at startup or to stop it

Looks like lots of hard work but I have to say I hate the new icons, the Beta 2 versions were much brighter with a proper XP/Vista feel. They’re very grey and 9X feeling now 🙁

Also something that seems to have reared its head is a set of horrible lines if one chooses to turn on the Menu bar and Links bar. ewww, again very clunky and 9X feeling, I loved the way that in Beta 2 everything had its place but didn’t need seperators. Seems to ruin the modern look/flow.

Does Beta 3 give an option for links that "Open In New Window" to be opened in a new Tab instead? I’m getting tired in Beta 2 of having "New Window" weblinks open a new IE instance instead of adding a new tab.

I have a problem, when I go to run IE 7 Beta 3 I get a short (under a second) Shadow of a browser window and then it closes, no error msg or anything it just goes away, Ctrl alt del doesn’t show a copy of IE running

There’s one more change I want to tell you about, first because I think it’s a great example of a small detail that makes a big difference in how much people enjoy using the browser, and secondly because it was expertly done by one of our new summer interns, Michael Ritche."

Thank you so much, this is the best change ever. The thing that would show up to magnify the picture was so annoying. I really hated it. The new zoom feature works perfectly.

Only one small detail is that the magnifying glass does not show every time when a picture is first loaded. Sometimes it’s just the mouse cursor that’s shown when hovering over the picture. The feature still works perfectly in those cases, so it’s only a little detail.

There’s one more change I want to tell you about, first because I think it’s a great example of a small detail that makes a big difference in how much people enjoy using the browser, and secondly because it was expertly done by one of our new summer interns, Michael Ritche."

Thank you so much, this is the best change ever. The thing that would show up to magnify the picture was so annoying. I really hated it. The new zoom feature works perfectly.

Only one small detail is that the magnifying glass does not show every time when a picture is first loaded. Sometimes it’s just the mouse cursor that’s shown when hovering over the picture. The feature still works perfectly in those cases, so it’s only a little detail.

As you were mentioning earlier about the re-order bug on the toolbar probably not being fixed in IE7… I was wondering since you now know of my main concern, is that something that can be fixed for IE7 or is this something that I can just stop hoping that a fix will come out for it in future releases of IE7?

Great job on the new beta! One thing I’ve noticed missing in IE7 thus far that I found very useful before is that when you right-click on the Back or Forward buttons a popup menu identical to the one that shows up when you click on its respective drop-down button appears. Can you please bring that back? It’s much more convenient than having to move my mouse back to the drop down to get the menu.

@Eduardo Valencia: The problem is that the error page has to cover a lot of cases, and hence it’s pretty generic. On Vista, there’s a link to launch connection diagnostics.

Are you sure you disabled the filter? You have to do this using Tools | Internet Options | Advanced. If you just turn off the webservice, the offline heuristic scans still run.

@Jamie: The majority of users didn’t like having Stop & Refresh be the same button, and having them be the same causes a number of problems (E.g. can’t hit stop button to stop background music if it’s a refresh button etc).

We would like to integrate find on page into the search box, but this won’t happen until a future release.

@Phranque: Tools | Internet Options | Tab Settings to make all links open in new tabs.

@Mike: If IE fails at startup, try starting IE in no-addons mode using the link in the Accessories / System tools on the start menu. If that doesn’t work, use the Internet Control Panel’s Advanced Tab to restore IE to defaults.

nice improve its a bit faster than before with pictures websides but it can be better.

also it would be nice if the feeds where easier to read… you have to go to favorites then click to use a tab to read them, in firefox you just click on the title which ones you want to read without having to scroll between them

Unfortunately, some bugs are still not fixed. On my computer, if I choose Page==>security report twice continually, the security report simply becomes a snapshot of top left corner of IE 7 window. It also crashed once when I click on my RSS list. RSS news still turn grey even if you didn’t read the details for anyone of them .

Well, at least beta 3 works ok now and I have completely abandoned firefox.

Where is download manager improvement?!?!? I don’t require IE team to write a download manager because the team will be sued by third parties. I just want to make IE work more closely with my download manager without having to introduce unstable poorly written add-ons or to modify critical system files.

You still have a mindnumbingly stupid/non-intuitive interface going though. All of the pretty icons in the world don’t make this thing any more fun to use:

1. The stop/refresh are on the right. Dumb. I have to move all the way to the other side of the screen to get them and they’re tiny so as an end user I have to be mouse accurate. It only took you guys 15 years to figure out that the corners are the best place, and only 7 years of the Start Bar to figure out that the Start button should be active in the bottom left pixel and not require aiming. Now you’re doing it all over again with this inane interface.. WHY???

2. The down arrow for your back button is under the forward button. Anyone else notice how stupid this is? If you watn to confuse a user, you’re doing a great job!

3. Pages, tools… great… makes no sense where they are, and prevents me from opening lots of tabs because they eat up space. whoohoo! Just what I always wanted.

As much as I don’t really like firefox, you guys have done an excellent job at ensuring that I’ll keep using it, despite your rendering improvements (hopefully all of the zillions of bugs reported on all of the CSS sites are fixed that you introduced with IE7 b1/b2).

Get a UI guy to come in and design this. It isn’t hard, it’s a browser, not rocket science and moving buttons around for no reason, is lame. Especially when they make it less usable than before.

Another vote for resizable searchbox, and I’m looking forward to "Find on this page" to be integrated into searchbox too. Hope it’ll be something like searchbox of Windows Desktop Search (instantly list of results in pop-up windows).

Love the UI changes, glad you’re really listening to user feedback on this! I think most everything user’s (the majority of them anyway) have complained about in the UI has been changed. There is one notable exception though, the ability to reorder all the menus/toolbars… I’d still really like to know why I can’t put the menus above the address bar. I’ve been using IE7 since the initial beta and I’ve still yet to get used to the menu being below the address bar!

In Beta 1 and Beta 2, when opening a folder of links in the favorites center, then opening another folder, the first folder would automatically close. In beta 3, if you click a second, third or fourth etc. folder they all remain open (expanded). Is this a new design? It was much better, in my opinion, the old way.

Now I have to scroll or click the folder I do not want expanded any longer a second time.

I love all the improvements that have been made, keep up the great work!

Hey, I don’t know if you’ve fixed this but occassionally when browsing the internet with a few tabs open it hogs ALOT of RAM. Sometimes almost 100,000k and the tabs and what-not occassionally "lagged". These bugs were from beta 2, just hope they get fixed cos IE7 > Firefox now :), keep up the good work team.

@Max Stevens [MSFT] – How could I not notice a shot of the Calgary Tower, taken from the south (and slightly to the west)?

I see that you guys also changed the downloading animation. I kinda like it. Unlike the new horizontal lines in the main UI which just waste space and look like total crud. At least one of the lines goes away in full screen mode.

However, the design flaw which leads to my other toolbars being removed in full screen mode persists to this day. I mean, ya, it might be "as designed", but as designed is just plain wrong here. My toolbars are NOT wasting any screen space here, they have my links on them and I have to get out of full screen mode just to get back to them. Don’t you guys realize that this makes fullscreen mode useless? If I have to keep flipping in and out of full screen mode to use the browser, I am NEVER going to use it, and neither is anyone else.

It is not like my google toolbar (or msn toolbars for others) and my links toolbar will waste any screen space in full screen mode – thye are hidden. Why not let me have them when I mouse to the top of the screen? This is NOT a very useful design.

The sites I hit every day are in my links toolbar (in folders which I can’t custom order, but that is a seperate bitch) and I leave the bulk of my favorites for that 1 time in a month or year site. Being able to get to that favorites menu is NOT helpful, as it is FULL of sites I use rarely, with my common sites inconveniently buried (and you always have to click into them). Give me the same toolbars in fullscreen that I have in non-fullscreen or just remove fullscreen from the product.

Oh, and incidently, I *ALWAYS* use my google toolbar for searching the current page, so I need it all the time as well. It is quick, highlights and doesn’t have a near impossible to navigate thumbnail image (what are the MSN toolbar people thinking?), so that is ANOTHER reason I have keep flipping back to get at the toolbar.

Gimme my darn toolbars. I don’t care if they are hidden in a slide down in fullscreen mode (which is cool as it provides lots of viewing area), but they MUST be there when I mouse to the top of the screen and the toolbars slide into view.

I openned a bug on this, but it was shut down in a heartbeat by Ben A. Please, PLEASE discuss this amongst the team and do the right thing, for the next release even.

please please live an option in for CLASSIC LOOK(file edit view…menus stay where they were in previous versions…ABOVE THE URL BAR….ABOVE NOT BELOW).Justtttttttttttttttt make it so it can be dragged up and down or smth.

1st of all, I am used to having a menubar at the top of every application, in the grand old tradition of all previous Microsoft programs, as well as all of the competing browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Secondly, in IE6, I could put ALL my toolbars in ONE ROW, including the menubar, then the back, forward, refresh, stop, and home buttons, and then the address bar. THAT saved a lot of screen real estate without removing ANY functionality. You guys have done some good stuff on the backend, but really, you need to clean up the GUI. There are small amounts of customizability, but it is laughable. I can’t believe you would ruin a good thing. IE6 had a user interface that was perfect except for the lack of tabbed browsing. When I use Firefox or Opera I set them up to look just like IE6. But IE7? Ugly, and impossible to customize. You need to make it so you can move the toolbars around, JUST LIKE IN IE6. It’s not that hard, just revert back to the old code, or something. Is there any way I could make it LOOK like IE6 but still have the functionality of IE7? I can guarantee that 99% of consumers, if you make this the final release version and put it out on Windows Update, are going to be like "GOD THIS IS UGLY, AND I CAN’T CHANGE IT TO MAKE IT LOOK NORMAL LIKE IT IS SUPPOSED TO!" So you had better fix it before it is a final release. Now as for the speed of the browser and the new features, sure, great, you have done neat stuff. But I just feel like vomiting when I see that awful round left arrow button in the upper left corner, on the left side of an annoying big fat toolbar that I can’t get rid of or customize or move. I’m sure it would just take, like, 2 seconds to put back the old code from IE6 that let you put toolbars wherever you want. And by the way, when I try to install the latest version of Adobe/Macromedia Flash, I have to go through all sorts of hoops and click Yes on security warning windows and little yellow annoying things that come up at the top of the screen like 5 times in a row before the thing FINALLY installs. That happens for ANY ActiveX control I try to install by going to the webpage that installs it. I think ONE security warning dialog box is enough. Or maybe have the yellow thing at the top of the screen and THEN the dialog box if you click on the yellow thing at the top. But try and minimize the number of mouse-clicks necessary to get things done. As for your icons, no complaints… but the forward and back button (& other buttons in the address bar) should also be able to be either large or small. I like my buttons SMALL. Just let me rearrange toolbars on my own computer to save screen real estate and I’ll be happy. Opera does a very good job of letting you arrange toolbars any way you want, but a lousy job of displaying certain webpages properly. So maybe, you could copy them? Thanks.

IE has hundreds of millions of users, and there’s reason to be skeptical when someone complains and implies that "everyone" agrees with them. In order to ship, sometimes we just have to decide in favor of the majority of feedback. Where an issue is contentious and high-visibility, we try to provide an option, but there are limits to how many switches we can put in and still ship in a reasonable amount of time.

"Love the UI changes, glad you’re really listening to user feedback on this! I think most everything user’s (the majority of them anyway) have complained about in the UI has been changed. There is one notable exception though, the ability to reorder all the menus/toolbars… I’d still really like to know why I can’t put the menus above the address bar. I’ve been using IE7 since the initial beta and I’ve still yet to get used to the menu being below the address bar! "

Because this is the new layout for all microsoft products. The File, edit, etc bar is not being used anymore. For Vista, the address bar is at the top (i don’t think one can change it there). They programmed ie for XP this way to conform to the vista and new microsoft ui standard look.

All these comments are a mess, but it looks like they do get some attention, so I suppose I’ll join the rest.

Do whatever you want with the UI, I can work around that.

(I, do however think it silly that we went through all that trouble about agreeing on what the RSS/Feed icon should look like so we don’t confuse users; but IE has decided it belongs in the toolbar, not the address bar where everyone else seems to put it. That said, IE beat the Firefox team to getting their "feed view" right and they did better than Safari in making it useful. As long as it works, I’ll be good.)

However, UI aside, I can’t understand the disregard and disagreement over CSS2. It annoys me that I continue to write code that works fine for everyone else, but then need to tweak it just for IE6/7 to be alright.

I’m not an expert on it, but here’s what I see:

* It seems that IE7 still fails to do anything but ignore adjacent sibling selectors and attribute selectors. It might even ignore direct child selectors still, but I haven’t checked.

* Positioning absolutes in relatives still results in stuff in one place for Safari, Firefox, and Opera – and in another place for IE7. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s annoying.

The only reason I now see for people to use firefox is CSS compliance. That, and religous zealotry.

Contrary to a lot of people’s opinions, the new interface works perfectly. I really don’t see how people can’t find anything anymore. It takes an initial minute to get the fact that the menu is gone and that all the options are now under the toolbar buttons, but seriously, is that really such a big hurdle?

Ok, just installed the new version, and umm, please, oh pleaseeeeeeeeeee lose those horizontal lines in the toolbars, it looks terrible, and, for some reason, my ‘research’ icon in the toolbar refuses to stay visible, it always wants to hide behind the ‘>>’ arrows.

Also, i don’t care if other people don’t like the ‘Image Toolbar’, i loved it, under ‘Tools->Internet Options->Advanced’ there was always a tick-box to turn the toolbar on and off, it would be nice if the toolbar was back and the option to turn it on and off was back.

If people who don’t like it don’t want to use it then they can easily just turn it off.

–> Favorites Are "Auto-Hidden" On The Left Side of The Displayed Webpage (Mouse Over=Displayed)!

–> The "Taskbar" Is Auto-Hidden On The Right Side of The Display (Mouse Over=Displayed)!

–> Status Bar Is Permanately Displayed At The Bottom!

As You Can See, In IE6, ALL My Work CAN BE DONE w/o E-V-E-R "BREAKING" IE6 Full Screen Mode!!!

IE7 Beta 3 DeGrades The Functionality of "Full Screen" Mode As Seen In IE6 By Constantly Having To "BREAK" Full Screen Mode To Access Tools/Menus/Buttons/Auto-Hides Not Visible/ UnReachable In IE7 Beta 3 "Full Screen" Mode!!! 🙁

–> Favorites Don’t "Auto-Hide" On The Left Side of The Displayed Webpage (Mouse Over=Displayed)!

–> You Have To "BREAK" Full Screen Mode To Minimize Or Close a Webpage!

–> The "Taskbar" Is Hidden On The Right Side of The Display (Mouse Over=Displayed) WILL NOT Display onMouseover On This Machine! (Others…?)

–> There’s More…

What We Should Be REALLY Talking About, Here, Is:

A Check Box In Internet Options–> Advanced–> Open All IE Windows In Full Screen Mode

*Provided IE6 & IE7 Full Screen Functionality Remained The Same (Status Quo)! But, That’s NOT To Be, As of Now, In IE7 Beta 3! 🙁

I Can’t Believe That, In The Year 2006, I Would Have To Take The Time To Write You, The IE Team, About The DeGradation (LOSS) of Functionality In "Full Screen" Mode!?

Several Posts Here Have Been Critical of The NEW IE7 Beta 3 UI & Have Asked You To Bring In a "UI Guy".

The UI still look like it was designed by people who never talked to each other. The Menu bar belongs at the top and should be there. I still have sites where the fonts dont render properly (fine in ie6 and other browers). IE7 is a huge improvement over IE6 but it still lags especially in regards to interface customisation and general interface user friendliness.

Ok wil you got me with Neoplanet, but basically any browser is better than this one if the rendering engine works.

Internet have been trying to fix this error making web developers to add an especific code to their CSS and that my friend is hell wrong. I don’t belive they bother to work in the intarface first instead of fixing THE RENDERING problems.

Look I hate firefox, for many reasons, I dislike to use any browser, if I have one by default in my PC, but I’m forced to install it, since i can’t see most of the websites I visit frequently.

The feedback from Cnet.Download users, showed that I say is the true. Maybe microsoft and mozzilla can reach an agreetment and make firefox the definitive browser and focus on fixing firefox memory problems after operning 7 tabs.

I used Beta 2 of IE7. I found that it lost the flexibility of its look. You can customize much more in IE6 (changing the location of buttons, link bar, etc.). You can place the menu, links and address field in just two lines, but IE7 requires three lines. What I disliked about Firefox is also the bad flexibility. I did not want IE7 to follow it. I haven’t tried the Beta 3 yet, but I hope it will be better.

Does Beta 3 give an option for links that "Open In New Window" to be opened in a new Tab instead? I’m getting tired in Beta 2 of having "New Window" weblinks open a new IE instance instead of adding a new tab.

On Thursday, June 29, 2006 10:00 PM by EricLaw [MSFT Answered:

@Phranque: Tools | Internet Options | Tab Settings to make all links open in new tabs.

I too have the same complaint. When I go to Tools | Internet Options | Tab Settings there is no setting "to make all links open in new tabs." But in the Group Box "Open links from other programs in:" I selected option "A new tab in the current window" and still when I have an instance of IE7 already open and click on a Hyperlink in Outlook Express a new instance of IE7 beta 3 window is started that contains a single tab with the page pointed to by the Hyperlink. Then when I click on other Hyperlinks in OE they will appear in the new IE7 window but on the same single tab that the first Hyperlink used. IMO this still needs to be fixed.

Other than that I’m quite pleased with the progress made from beta 2 to beta 3 and hope to see even more in the next release of IE7.

I upgraded to IE7 beta 3 from IE7 beta 2 on IBM R52, Win XP SP2. Now whenever I am starting my machine I get a lot of error message w.r.t files like br_funcs.exe, reg.exe, logman.exe, xcopy.exe. All messages are coming during startup only. If I ignore all the messages by closing them then my machine works fine. So I have to revert back to IE7 beta 2.

@EricLaw: That’s nice, but if such a work around exists, how hard is it to add a checkbox or something to put the menubar at the top? I’d prefer the ability to drag it, but it seems like a checkbox could turn that registry setting on/off rather easily and only have minimal risk of introducing new bugs.

Hey, I’m commenting on this using Firefox, b/c when I look at your blog page using IE 7 Beta 3, I only see the first three paragraphs of the blog. I remembered this issue rearing its head in IE 6 occassionally; in that case toggling full screen on and off would cause the whole blog to display. I tried full scree, and sure enough, the rest of the blog was visible. Unfortunately, when I toggled back to the regular view I was back to the first three paragraphs. What’s up with that. (And yes, I have rebooted my computer after installing IE7 beta 3. And yes, I uninstalled IE7 Beta 2 and rebooted before installing beta 3). Pretty sad when a competitor’s product displays your own blog better than the "new and improved" product the blog itself is touting.

I get it now. The screenshot of the menu bar is too big to fit in the allotted space unless I have IE maximized, and so drop–something I rarely do since I’m using a fairly high screen resolution–and thus drops it and the rest of the blog down to the bottom of the page below your sidebar. Firefox, on the other hand, forces the image to stay ther even though it runs into sidebar a little bit, which is a better compromise I think. Most people I know–and I work with a lot of older people–insist on the keeping their screens’ resolution at 800 x 600, so this could be an issue.

Over at Microsoft&amp;#8217;s IEBlog, General Manager Dean Hachamovitch yesterday announced the availability of Internet Explorer Beta 3:This morning we released IE7 Beta 3 for Windows XP. This version includes improvements in reliability, compatibility,..

I’m surprised no one mentioned one of the biggest improvements. It doesnt steal the focus anymore! In b2 if I hit+home to go to the homepage (google) the foucs stayed in the address bar. Now it actually moves to the page!

Love it! The image resize magnifier is great! No more remnants of the gray square all over my images when I scroll down!

And to all the commenters about IE copying FireFox. Good grief! All I ever hear is "MS should make IE more like FireFox. It needs tabbed browsing, it needs integrated search, it needs RSS feeds, it needs this and that." Then MS does what you ask, and now it’s, "MS is copying stuff that FireFox has had since the beginning." If you have a problem with MS copying or implementing features, that’s fine. But don’t be such hypocrites.

EricLaw [MSFT] – Your suggestions – "@Mike: If IE fails at startup, try starting IE in no-addons mode using the link in the Accessories / System tools on the start menu. If that doesn’t work, use the Internet Control Panel’s Advanced Tab to restore IE to defaults."

Does not work for me. I have the same situation Mike had. The browser flashes open for a fraction of a second and closes. I then have to uninstall and go back to IE6… I tried the process twice with the same results.

I was doing fine with Beta 2 for the last month and a half… Can you provide other suggestions? I am also running Office 2007 Beta if that helps.

Is the link to IE7 Beta 2 still available, I can’t bare the thought of using IE6 again…

EricLaw [MSFT] – Your suggestions – "@Mike: If IE fails at startup, try starting IE in no-addons mode using the link in the Accessories / System tools on the start menu. If that doesn’t work, use the Internet Control Panel’s Advanced Tab to restore IE to defaults."

Does not work for me. I have the same situation Mike had. The browser flashes open for a fraction of a second and closes. I then have to uninstall and go back to IE6… I tried the process twice with the same results.

I was doing fine with Beta 2 for the last month and a half… Can you provide other suggestions? I am also running Office 2007 Beta if that helps.

Is the link to IE7 Beta 2 still available, I can’t bare the thought of using IE6 again…

I can’t believe how cavalier people here are about Microsoft’s poor attitude about CSS compliance. When I am doing CSS work about 30% of my time is adding hacks to work around broken CSS handling in IE. Just yesterday I actually had to go back and redesign a page to use table layout because IE’s CSS handling was so poor that I could never get it to work correctly in IE – even when it worked perfectly in Firefox and Safari.

I could really care less about the UI elements used to view a scaled image. Why don’t you spend some time fixing your horrible CSS support? Rendering web pages is supposed to be the primary purpose of a damn browser. MS should at least make an effort at getting it right.

Please could you give an option to make favourites (and also links from the links toolbar) open in a new tab from a standard left click. Also it would be nice if you could middle click the ‘Home’ button and it opens in a new tab.

Finally an option to retrieve previous tabs like in Firefox and Opera would be a lifesaver as I’m forever closing tabs by accident.

Those minority standars are becoming more popular, is not only those standars is, also the CSS bug.

IE is already at 64% of usage by users, till when they have to wait to make IE support at least the CSS well? till they lose the 50% or more of the market?

They reacted and started to develop IE7 when they saw how popular firefox and the rest of the browsers were becoming. Maybe when they find out that they lost the 60% of the market which is the projection for this Year, they will wake up from the dream and stop thinking in pregnant birds.

You are the newb, they don’t make money with IE7 or are you saying that they will sell IE7 at release?

2nd you are the newb, everyday more websites are using CSS, because it makes the web look better and load faster, since you can do more without adding useless addons.

Sorry, sorry, but more sites are using it, and if you put in google, even in msn about IE rendering errors you will find countless threads related with it, so the minority is growing, IE as predicted if keep going the same way is going to lose the 60% of the content. Maybe we should start talking about the Firefoxnet.

FIX THIS, or please give me a link to get rid IE7 and the built in IE version from my windows xp.

I was going to install beta 3 . I uninstalled beta 2 then tried download when I was ONCE AGAIN asked to Confirm Windows (6 mo brand new dell) Genuine-ness or whatever. This is about the 5th time in as many downloads. I have had enough of that, If MS cant figure out my Factory Installed XP is Genuine after 5 requests (and Active X / Script Installs & MY WASTED TIME) MS Doesn’t deserve my business. I have auto updating turned on already, MS installs patches all the time, but they want me to waste more time to download more software to check if I am legit?

Whomever is the PM of that (Windows Genuine or whatever its called) project should be fired.

please please please please bring back the ‘show blocked popup’ that was in the xp service pack 2 betas! this feature was so great and worked perfectly! can’t you just uncomment that code or something?

let me give you a REAL WORLD example of why we need this feature.

pizzahut.com for example: when you place an online order, they popup a window that says when you ordered, how long it will take, and the time it will be there.

now, say you click order, ie tells you the popup was blocked, if you then click ‘temporarily allow popups from this site’ it refreshes the page! what does that do? it resends your order! not good!

this is not the only site that does stuff like this. show blocked popup was great, as well as ctrl-click to override the popup blocker! please bring it back and make the IE popup blocker the best one available!

I understand the the new IE7 will be complient with web standards, and that it will break existing sites that has IE6 specific hacks.

my suggestion is that you guys create a tool that will help web developers to identify such hacks and incompatibilities that was tolerated by IE6, and give enough information so that the developer will be able to quickly fix his site.

You try putting your most used favorites into the link toolbar and then using fullscreen mode for a week.

You will get sick of pressing F11. The experience is one of the worst MS has ever provided. You have to keep switching in and out of fullscreen mode. It is just easier to stay out of fullscreen mode, thus negating any use it might have.

I’m not asking you to make the app more complicated, but rather, SIMPLIER. Remove a switch here that takes away the toolbars. Honestly, since you don’t see the toolbars except when you want to, it really does not cause an issue to show them. However, NOT showing them means you have to keep moving in and out of, or rather NEVER entering fullscreen mode.

Why make a feature so hostile to normal usage that it renders that feature useless?

I think this is a case where the IE team needs to take a serous look a usability, I suspect that if you all switched to fullscreen only mode for a week you would hate it.

I assume that you do want fullscreen mode to be as useful and functional as non fullscreen mode yes? Or did you guys think we would want to keep turning it on and off all day?

@donbt99: I’m told that the deletion dialog bug is fixed in the RC1 builds.

@Ted: We’ve noted several times that we plan to address the limitations in the "Find" dialog in a future release– unfortunately, there just wasn’t time this time around. This area is probably a good hole for an add-on author to plug.

@Harry: Unfortunately, some applications go out of their way to override IE’s handling of hyperlinks; it appears that OE is one such application.

@Codemastr: Sorry… We gotta ship sometime. This simply didn’t make the bar.

@Luca: Blocking Referer is something we’re looking at for a future release. There are significant application compatibility concerns about doing this.

@Miniplayer.info: So when you start IE in add-on free mode, it still shuts down on startup? Interesting. Is there any error message, or is it just gone?

@Edward: Simply use CTRL+Click to open in a new tab.

@Cali: Alt+Enter in the search box (or the address bar) opens the target in a new tab.

@Luke: I believe that is the Media Center 2005 theme.

@Tim McGhee: Please post repro URLs or a bug. This should be working now.

@Nate: Show blocked popup has always refreshed the page, even on XPSP2.

@Raul: No. Certain applications essentially require individual IE windows and hence the applications can still create individual windows if they require. If you’re concerned about this, please contact the developers of those applications and request that they fix their application.

Open in new tab next to current works just great, however closing that tab doesn’t take me back to the previous focused tab, it goes to the last tab on the row. This is a very big annoyance, but so far it’s the only one I’ve found.

Nice job on the picture scaling. The old way was indeed odd. One minor little bug though. If you click on a link that brings up a picture that gets scaled, the cursor stays a normal cursor until you move off the picture and back onto it. I think the cursor should change immediately to the zoom cursor.

I have a question. If I’m accessing a secure page and if that page is getting some unsecured content a information bar popsup. How do I disable this? Its is really annoying and affects the page functionality as it resubmits the page.

Now, in beta 3, when i maximize the window, the status bar goes all the way down past the task bar so that the status bar and also the horizontal scroll is no longer visable since it is being hid by the Task Bar. Also it would be much help, once this issue is fixed to be able to open up IE in maximized mode.

Hi, I hear a lot of cool stuff in IE7… I don’t have it yet, but I would like to comment on this change in image handling:

Does the resize still shrinks the image into full view? I would love to have an option to shrink the image into full width (only) view! A lot of images have portrait orientation and get really small when shrinking… And now that almost everyone has a mouse with a roller, there shouldn’t be any problem scrolling a little to see the rest of the image!

This Blog site has been so helpful, since I just stumbled onto it. A "tech-bullet" has nagged me to upgrade to IE 7.0 and tells me about all the nifty stuff it has. BUT, he doesn’t tell me where to find it or how to make the changes to "make the magic happen." Now that I found this site, so much becomes clear.

@Santhosh: "If I’m accessing a secure page and if that page is getting some unsecured content a information bar popsup. How do I disable this?"

This is a security risk, and you should ask the site to fix their bug. If you are really want to ignore the security problem, choose "Enable" for the "Show Mixed Content" setting in Tools | Internet Options | Security | Internet | Custom…

@M: No update. We do not plan to ship IE7 for Windows 2000 for the many reasons described here previously. Sorry.

IE is already at 64% of usage by users, till when they have to wait to make IE support at least the CSS well? till they lose the 50% or more of the market?

Users aren’t switching because of CSS. The vast majority of Firefox idiots who post on this blog are complaining about GUI features, not CSS. "I switched to firefox because the tabs are better" "I switched to firefox because I like the ad blocker addon" that’s what user’s are saying. The end user couldn’t give a flying (insert whatever you like here) about standards. They just want it to work. Most sites are designed to work in IE. That’s all users care about. You’re a developer, you like standards. User’s couldn’t care less. The sooner you understand that, the better off you’ll be. It’s like when I was working for a company about a year ago and I was trying to convince them to convert an app from C++ to C# because that’s the "new way to go" in programming. I convinced the developers no problem. When I made the pitch to the sales team, the response I got is "do you think my 10 year old son sitting at his computer cares whether it’s C++ or C#? He just wants it to work." That’s the mentality of users. Whether it is standard, or 100% microsoft specific. If the website works (which almost all websites work in IE6) that’s what they care about. MS market share has almost nothing to do with standards.

It’s cute how you made me scroll down through four pages of blank space in between the "new icons" paragraph and the first image. This is due to the image being too wide for the screen with all the links on the right. I guess no one uses 1024×768 anymore.

@The View Master – I didn’t see any problems with Full Screen on my computer with IE7b3, it all works perfectly, the only thing that didn’t autohide was the status bar, however, everything looked all clean and in working order.

a bit late on this one, and it seems the response on the new UX updates has received various up/down nods from people… but i have to say — the very first thing i noticed after installing was the change in the icons.

why the change? was there alot of feedback asking for it or something? i actually grew to like the color on the refresh/stop/search icons up top… it was friendly, and the colors made it alot easier/visible at a glance…. the grey makes it alot less visible, and requires an extra cycle of the brain to register the button… hell, i even started to hunt all over the place in the hope that maybe there was a slick hidden option somewhere so i could change it back, but no such luck 🙁

luv being able to re-order the tabs, tho!

not sure about the two "favorites" icons being side-by-side… for a browser with such a wide userbase, is it really intuitive enough for mom ‘n pops? how many people do you think will click on the wrong icon by mistake? if it were me, i’d probably make it a single icon with maybe a down-arrow next to it with options like the Printer/Page/Tools icons over on the right… probably the same with the "new tab" at the end, since there’s a "Tab List" on the left, and a "New Tab" on the right… just kinda eats up valuable space.

Address window is of fixed size… getting annoying for too short or too long URLs.

I’d like a variable length – well, up to two lines since some redirects are a long string of ‘meaningless’ characters.

Left to right order made sense in pen and paper days. Now, for the most right handed users, some most often commands (Back, Open In New Tab, Save) would be more convenient on the Upper Top Right corner of the IE7 Window.

A personal floating bar where one could drag whatever buttons one needs would be a +.

I tried to install beta 3 but the installer complained that IE was already installed (probably because I already have beta 2). So I uninstalled this component. But the installer still came back with the same error.

Have you guys compared your UI with that of Opera? The tabbed browsing features in Opera are miles ahead of anything else out there, IMO. I love the fact that each tab has its own address bar, search bar, etc. It just feels right that way for some reason.

Also, the page scaling features in Opera work much better, and their "fit page to window" option is great.

Why not try to incorporate some of these great features in IE? Right now I swith back and forth between Opera and IE, with Opera being my main browser. I used to use IE exclusively, until Opera 8 came out and won me over.

One problem that I have consistantly faced is if more than one tab is open, as soon as I exit IE, an error pops up saying that an instruction at 0x…34(or something) tried to access memory location 0x00000004.

In the service pack 2 betas, i don’t think it did. as i recall if simply knew the address the popup was trying to open and simply re-opened it. i remember this, because in several critical cases, i.e. a POST page, i would have to show blocked popup, then allow it, as it not refresh that post page.

that one feature was the one thing that made the popup blocker in IE stand out from any other one that i had seen. it freakin ruled!

I’ve noticed that when I click on a tab, it moves directly to be the first in line, something that did not happen on beta 2 and seems (after 2 days of use)to be still very confusing, is it a bug, a feature? and if so, is there a possibility to turn it off?

I’ve been using IE7 for months now and feel that the improvements/new features outweigh the negatives.

Yes, I would love to be able to play with the toolbars more. I would love the ability to drag and drop and rearrange and add custom buttons.

In installing beata 3 I, like many, was forced to spend time with IE6 for a while. I realized then which feature it had which is missing in IE7-the folder button. It allowed exploring one’s computer and doing basic tasks within IE. I’ve searched and have seen no discussion about this change. Am I the only one who greatly misses this feature? Is the change security related? I’d greatly appreciate if someone responded to this question!

Also, I discovered an "anomaly" when on the New York Times site that began with beta2 and continues with beta3.

I am fond of printing NYT articles for future reading. Many articles are pages long. Alas, the "box" or frame, or whatever it is isn’t viewable. I messed with encoding and various advanced setttings and it will appear and then disappear. Weird. When in print preview the "print, email, save" options are there, but not on the live page.

In my frustration, I did find an inconvenient workaround. When I hit f 11, it appears! And it remains when I hit f 11 again. I must do this with every new page I wish to view in print view.

I’m a user, not a coder, so I have no clue as to what is up with this. It must have something to do with secure content? The way the NYT "sees" IE7?

I’m curious to see what happens when I apply that "patch" (for the third time) I need to access my Wells Fargo account. The one that changes the registry so that a site "thinks" it is looking at IE6.

I’m curious as to whether others get this same error. Just go to the NYT, click on an article, and see if the print option graphic shows up. No amount of tweaking the advanced settings worked-just the f11 trick.

Agreed. But I think you have kind of let the point slip right by you. I agree that the average user doesn’t give a hoot about web standards; most don’t even have the first clue about what they are. But Microsoft’s IE is LOSING market share to browsers that DO have good CSS support. So regardless of WHY it’s losing market share, IE is losing it and quite rapidly. If IE was to step into the minority, what then? In order to maintain the majority of the market share, Microsoft will eventually be forced into compliance with web standards whether they truly like it or not; the opposing market share is simply too large to ignore. The problem is Microsoft is being stubborn about it, but demand is the name of the game.

If you type in the URL of an ftp site which needs authentication, you do indeed get prompted in Beta 3 (which was not the case in Beta 2) with a box asking for your user name and password.

Beta 2 would simply display a blank page, but then you could go to the "File" dropdown menu and select "View FTP in Windows Explorer" and all would be good.

Now, in IE 7 Beta 3, you type in your password and username, and get some html rendering (which is what you’d get if you logged into most FTP sites anonymously anyway) with some message at the top of the page which says to "click Page" (had to look for that one for a while before I realized it was next to "Tools" ). You are then advised to click "View FTP Site in Windows Explorer".

Ok… only problem is it doesn’t work. Not at all.

The only thing which happens is a warning box which pops up which says "This FTP Site Cannot Be Viewed in Windows Explorer".

This is definitely broken. It needs fixing.

Please help. I depend on Windows integrated FTP client. It’s the best there ever was (better than any of the others, because it worked so easily with IE and Windows Explorer).

So why does it keep getting changed and disabled?

Please address this if you can or provide any info to those of us who need this functionality.

Just a small suggestion regarding the handling of attached files in rss-feeds:

I use feeds in IE7 to automatically get the newest podcasts downloaded onto my harddrive. Unfortunately, I have to check every single feed for new podcast releases and manually save the (already downloaded) file to my sync folder. I really would like to see an option, which would allow me to specify a folder into which every new podcast file is automatically copied.

I’d than only have to sync my MP3 player with that given folder instead of manually "collecting" each file.

"There’s one more change I want to tell you about, first because I think it’s a great example of a small detail that makes a big difference in how much people enjoy using the browser, and secondly because it was expertly done by one of our new summer interns, Michael Ritche."

@Mac: The "Restore last tab" option didn’t work like you would expect: It only stored tabs from the last saved set. The idea of auto-saving tabs (to recover from crashes) won’t make it into IE7, I’m afraid. It’s an interesting idea and a good opportunity for a plugin developer.

@Vaibhav: The crashes you’re describing are typical symptoms of buggy plugins. Try starting IE without Add-ons and see if the problems go away. If so, disable the addons one by one to find the culprit.

@Nate: I assure you that the popup blocker always has triggered a refresh. I wrote a popular popup blocker back in the day (www.bayden.com/popper) and I looked into how IE’s worked in great detail. There are tons of problems in trying to "reconstitute" a popup after it’s been blocked, and hence the refresh is needed.

@Donbt99: Thanks for the note on the Disk Cleanup tool. We’ll look into it.

@Yoni: Are you using this on an English build? If so, please file a bug. On Arabic builds, this is a known bug.

@Warren: IE and the desktop shell have been split. You can no longer browse the web in Windows Explorer, and you cannot browse your hard drive in Internet Explorer. (Internally, some technology is still shared.) This is primarily a security change, although there were other reasons to make the split. Please file a bug on the issue with printing. The User-Agent workaround for WellsFargo will still work, but should not be needed shortly as they are updating their site.

@Jerry: What happens if you just open the FTP site starting in Windows Explorer rather than IE. Does it work like you’d expect? If you can provide a test account, please file a bug and give us the details. Thanks!

I wonder why Max Stevens bothered to blog it out since Mozilla FireFox already have all those features included in their browser which released in year 2005. The most funny thing I find in the post is he claimed that the changes was made specifically related to beta testers’ feedbacks.

When it comes to CSS support, it’s not about whether it directly drives user to switch or not. I think the more important aspect is that it creates a "hostile" attitude from websites creators toward IE and in turn, they spread these hostile messages to their users. eg. They tell them to switch to Firefox.

So… FULL webstandard support might not directly drives regular users to switch, it sure does generate that hostility toward IE which many regular users are hearing from website creators.

You ask "What happens if you just open the FTP site starting in Windows Explorer rather than IE. Does it work like you’d expect?"

The answer is "NO". If I try to open the ftp site just using Windows Explorer (as I used to be able to do prior to installing Beta 3), the only thing that happens is IE 7 B3 now launches automatically, and I get the flat web view of the file directory for the ftp site in IE, which the same request to "click Page" and of course, when I do that and select "Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer" I get the same message, which is that the site can’t be viewed.

I have tried uninstalling, reinstalling, reverting back to IE 7 B2, and finally back to IE 6, and I find that it works the way it’s supposed to work in IE 6, works in IE 7 Beta 2, but IE 7 Beta 3 simply does not allow a "folder" view of any of the files at my ftp site.

The weird thing is that I did get it to work in Beta 3 on one of my desktop machines. I have no idea what the difference is between the two machines in terms of set up as it would relate to IE 7, but I will try to duplicate the settings of my desktop on which I got it to work to see if there’s something else which is getting in the way.

I guess what I’ll try now is to disable all startup programs and then work backwards by adding them back in, or perhaps disabling Norton Antivirus. Otherwise, I can’t imagine what’s getting in the way of FTP working in folder view in IE 7 Beta 3.

This new beta certainly is an improvement as far as the UI is concerned.

Any chance of a blog posting about whether you’ve worked to resolve any CSS regressions? I believe several bugs have been found in connection with the useful CSS fixes you made for Beta2, and it would be good to seek reassurance whether those regressions are being addressed, or have been.

One poster above noted about min-height et al being fixed for images, so it sounds like some work has been done. Could you post on this, please?

"IE and the desktop shell have been split. You can no longer browse the web in Windows Explorer, and you cannot browse your hard drive in Internet Explorer. (Internally, some technology is still shared.) This is primarily a security change, although there were other reasons to make the split. Please file a bug on the issue with printing. The User-Agent workaround for WellsFargo will still work, but should not be needed shortly as they are updating their site."

This is an interesting comment and surely represents a huge policy shift, following the initial merger of IE [iexplore] and (Windows) Explorer [explorer] back in IE4.

Finally got round to downloading IE 7B3 and so far am quite impressed by what I see – however, I do agree with a lot of the posts that have already been put up here e.g. giving people the ability to at least resize the address bar and search box, etc. However, I would also like to add a couple of other points to this.

1. Firstly, while I feel that the new drag and drop movement of the tabs is an absolutely brilliant and invaluable tool, I was quite surprised and disappointed that this could not be accomplished through the quick tab screen (e.g. being able to drag and drop the thumbnail page images). This is something that I feel would be quite an intuitive way of moving the tabs around – especially to people who might be more visually orientated.

In addition, I know that I’ve mentioned this, but I still like the idea of having a ‘manage tabs’ menu where the ‘tabs list’ currently is, which would bring together all the generic options for controlling the tabs as a group together (including the tab list, but in an outward arrow, as well as things like ‘refresh all’, ‘close other tabs’ ‘arrange by’, ‘print all’, etc.). This could also bring in the ability to select multiple tabs at once, (e.g. done through holding either the shift, or ctrl buttons when selecting them – like in other programmes).

2. I’ve also noticed that the issues with the address bar are still present (e.g. the drop down menu disappearing if you’ve selected it while a page is loading, the inconstant behaviour of those funny icons, for example them sometimes only changing if you physically bring up the drop down menu, even though you’ve been navigating to totally different websites through thingws like links, or with the back and forward functions etc.). Is there any news as to whether these issues will be corrected in the final release?

3. I know I’ve already made suggestions about the phishing filter and the various messages you get with it (e.g. using stronger langrage, especially when IE first gives you the option of turning it on or not. For example, actually mentioning words like ‘ID fraud’ and ‘scam artists’), but I have quite a specific one here, that I feel could be quite dangerous if left unchanged. This is the message you get after manually checking a webpage and being given the ‘all clear’ – ‘this website is not a suspicious or reported phishing website’ – I believe it to be a very naive and potentially misleading statement. In other words, I feel that telling users that the website is neither suspicious, or has been reported in this current fashion, could lull many into a false sense of security, as they could take it to mean that the website that they are on is completely safe. The possibility of any misunderstandings here could be totally negated with a simple rewording of the comment e.g. ‘Microsoft Phishing Filter cannot identify any signs common to phishing websites and it has not been reported as a known one. However, this technology is not 100% effective, so personal vigilance should always be maintained when entering in private details’. Now that was only a suggestion and I’m sure there are slightly more concise ways of putting that, but I feel something along those lines would be clearer for all users.

4. I’ve also found a slightly weird behaviour when using yahoo, since downloading Beta 3. It’s slightly hard to explain, but I’ll try – when you perform a search (funnily enough everyone except for the web search, itself – so that’s video, images, directory, etc.), the ‘more’ link doesn’t appear across the top of the search bar with the rest, but instead almost appears inside it. I’m not sure if it’s something wrong at yahoos end, with Beta 3, or just me, but I figured I should probably mention it anyways.

Once again, apologies for length, but I really wanted to get some of these things of my chest.

After all that, I just remembered that I forgot something – darn typical, lol. I remember a while ago that you guys said that where looking into ways of making the tab a person is currently on more visible (bolding the text, etc.), however I cannot see any noticable changes in this respect. So essentially, I was just wondering if this is something that you are still working on?

@Codemastr: Sorry… We gotta ship sometime. This simply didn’t make the bar.

I’d agree with that statement, if I and others hadn’t been suggesting it for several months now! You’re right, it’s too late now. However, it wasn’t too late when we first asked and were ignored. To date, no one has explained why this ability was REMOVED since IE6.

You’re right, there are people that say "use Firefox" on their websites. I on the other hand have "use IE." I work for a company that designs web applications, all of their software is designed for IE, not Firefox. So you’re right, there are those hostile against IE and telling people to switch if they want to view their sites. But on the flipside, there are those like myself who do the opposite. I’ve even made a few sites where you couldn’t view the site in Firefox because it would redirect you to the IE download link. I’ve certainly not done the research to prove these two sides cancel eachother out, but I doubt you’ve done the research to prove more people hate IE than hate Firefox.

@Thomas: This was covered a while ago. As I mentioned, there were a number of reasons for the change. Another of the reasons is that IE7 is a shared codebase between XP and Vista. On Vista, IE runs in protected mode, which Windows Explorer cannot do. Hence, this also necessitated the split.

@Serious Sam: Regarding #3, yes, for RC1 we’ve already changed the language on the message after a manual check is performed.

Regarding the "active tab" visibility: Do a side-by-side comparison between Beta2 and Beta3 and you’ll see that the active tab is more obvious in Beta-3. We’ve tweaked the colors a bit and tweaked the pixels around where the tab connects to the frame below. The active tab is also slightly taller.

@codemastr: Trust me, no one was ignoring the blog. But remember, it’s not as if anyone’s been just sitting around thinking "Gee, I wish I had some ideas for new features" and hence didn’t write the feature you wanted. Unfortunately, the schedule is a tough master and there’s lots of great stuff we simply didn’t get to (inline search being near the top of the list).

We still have the regkey. For the miniscule percentage of advanced users who really want the menus at the top, this is the workaround.

As to the question about why there’s less toolbar customizability since IE6, I believe this actually has been addressed on the blog before. In addition to the schedule limitations, there were also design and technical limitations that we had to operate within. I assure you, we’ve gotten the feedback that advanced users want more UI customizability, and this is something we’ll be looking toward offering in future releases.

I think that it’s bad business to redirect anyone to a browser download link just because they are using "some other" browser. A "Get Firefox" or "Get IE" icon is one thing, but making a website browser-specific is just not good business. Although I highly recommend the use of Firefox over Internet Explorer, I won’t go as far as to force that upon my viewers.

You making IE-only websites doesn’t help the situation any more then if I was to make Gecko-only websites. Unless of course it absolutely requires IE (e.g. Active X), in which case I’m of the opinion that it then shouldn’t be on the web in the first place.

The thing about me being a strong advocate of CSS standards is quite simple. I can usually get a design that takes advantage of CSS to render in IE so it looks like it does in a Gecko-based browser or Opera, but I often have to use a bakers-dozen number hacks in order to do so. I’m also forced to avoid certain CSS attributes altogether (such as max-width) since I know there’s no practical way to achieve such a result in IE. There was even one instance where I had to code a tabled layout for a client’s design just so I could meet a deadline, because I couldn’t work out the CSS hacks for IE in time. The simple fact of the matter is that it’s uncalled for.

Microsoft has yet to give us web designers a good explanation as to why they refuse to offer decent CSS2 support in IE. It’s a browser, it’s meant to browse the web. CSS is one of the web designers’ tools, and it’s usually because of IE that we can’t take full advantage of it. Go look at the source of http://www.msdn.com and you’ll find that it uses a W3C XHTML 1.0T DOCTYPE. View the source of this blog and you’ll find it uses a W3C HTML 4.0 DOCTYPE. Yet Microsoft refuses to follow many of the W3C standards. That’s pretty hypocritical if you ask me.

I also think it’s necessary for me to mention that I’m not one of these anti-Microsoft persons out there. I’ve never had any serious problems with Windows 2000 or XP (though 95, 98 and ME were disaster prone). Outside of games I’ve never had 2000 or XP crash on me, and I’ve never encountered a blue screen on either. I’ve purchased many Microsoft games in the past such as Age of Empires I & II, Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness, Combat Flight Sim, Flight Sim 2004, and a few others, and have been happy with all of them. I purchased an Xbox over a PS2. I even got an envelope in the mail a while back in regards to some legal crap that Microsoft encountered that immediately entitled me to $90 of reimbursement for my purchase of Windows 98, and I tossed it. I can say that I’m all for Microsoft, but I’m very disappointed in the IE team and their total disregard to the requests of the web designers.

I read your comment again and realized you were referring to web applications, which usually require Active X (therefore IE-only). My bad. But I am of the opinion that they then shouldn’t be on the web anyways. Anyways, sorry about that.

I’ve built many, and every single one, ran on open standards. (HTML, JavaScript, & CSS for the interface)

Now of course, there were dozens and dozens of hacks to get IE to behave with the CSS and the JavaScript, but other than that, no Active-X, ever.

Why on earth would you want to tie yourself to a specific vendor? Not in this Century, that’s for sure. Lets not forget, if IE didn’t suddenly re-emerge a few months back, we would have all pressumed that they had officially closed development.

Well if Codemastr is referring to server side applications which use PHP, ASP, CGI, Ruby, etc. then making the website IE-only is completely uncalled for (which is what I thought he meant when I wrote my comment before last). But then I re-read his comment and thought he may have been referring to programs which are delivered through Active X, which would explain the IE-only bit. I guess Codemastr will have to clarify whether he meant Active X applications or server side. 😕

@Geez: Yeah, and Firefox stole it from the Windows Picture and Fax viewer, that stole it from some other app that stole it from <etc etc etc etc etc> that stole it from the original GUI interfaces invented at Xerox Parc in the 1960s. Everybody copies everybody else. Who cares?

I’ve got a serious problem with 7 – the zoom hijacked the change text size behavior of 6 and every other browser. IOW, ctrl-mouse wheel used to change the text size, now it zooms (and makes the whole page bigger, meaning left-right scrolling.)

There appears to be no keyboard/kb+mouse shortcut to change text size. I can’t deal with that.

I’m getting older, and my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I generally have to change fonts to Larger and sometimes Largest, as most web designers seem to have great eyesight and their normal fonts are just too small for me. Ctrl-Wheelup was my most used shortcut, and now it’s useless. Zoom is great, but can’t we have both?

I have no idea what was going on with my laptop, but as I indicated in another post, IE7 B3 did manage to get the trick with an FTP site which requires authentication to open using the "Page" and then selecting "View FTP Site in Windows Explorer" using the folder view.

I depend on the folder view, because it allows me to select multiple files, delete and move them to directories on my on machines, and then edit them and move them back. It’s actually much easier to use than any separate FTP program I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried a lot of them (WS FTP Pro, CuteFTP, LeapFTP, etc).

I guess what must have happened on my laptop when I couldn’t get it to work as intended is that I munged up some files in IE by installing and then uninstalling repeatedly. I first had IE 7B2 and uninstalled, then installed B3, but it must have messed up something, because the FTP folder view was dead in the water.

Well, I spent all last night trying this out on various other machines I own, three of them with XP Pro, and it worked flawlessly. I selected the "ftp://ftpsitename.com&quot; in the URL line of IE 7 B3, and got the flat, html version in the browser and held my breath, selected "Page" and then "View FTP in Windows Explorer" and it worked on three separate machines.

So….I tried to roll back my laptop by using system restore, but it got even more screwed up because of the various installs and uninstalls (which is not ideal when you also try to use system restore’s checkpoints and the software which was installed when a checkpoint recorded is no longer there).

Suffice it to say, I tried just about everything, including using the recovery console, deleting the five "windowssystem32configxxx" files (default, sam, software, security, and system) and replacing them with restore points contained in the system volume folder (a very neat trick, but be very careful if you ever want to do it…but it will amaze your friends and neighbors and save you tons of time if it works correctly).

The bottom line though is that because other files were mucked up (search wasn’t working correctly, elements of "help and support" no longer worked either, etc), I just decided to bite the bullet and do a "Repair Install" of Windows XP Pro.

This is the sort of install (for those who may not be familiar) where you put the CD in the drive, boot up from it, and then select the "repair installation" (NOT to be confused with the Recovery Console).

Essentially, it does a clean restore of windows, but doesn’t (in most cases) require you to reinstall preferences, user accounts, or all of your software. Be forewarned: If you’re going to do this, use a "slipstreamed" version of XP Pro (meaning one that has SP2 added to the basic XP install files). You can make your own, but that’s a whole different subject. Also be forwarned, when you use this method to clean up a mucked up windows install, you’ll also need to re-enter your Windows Activation Code, so have the numbers handy (they’re on the sticker), because you’ll need them.

In any event, the repair install worked and I got back to a "clean" version of IE 6 and Windows, and I then reinstalled all of the security and other updates (which took longer than doing the repair….Why isn’t there an SP 3 by now?).

I then installed IE 7 Beta 3,and much to my amazement, the FTP authentication and "Page" click to allow folder view works.

I’m glad I had the long weekend to work on this, and I’m happy that it worked out finally.

So, to all of the others out there who have also been saying that the FTP folder view optinon is broken, well….it’s probably something with one or more files on your own machine, and it’s best to start from scratch (even if you don’t really have to go back to the beginning) by getting as clean an install to work with as possible.

By web application I generally mean something over an intranet, where I can control what the user’s are using.

@Walter

As for tying myself to a specific vendor? Uhh, that’s pretty common. When a company develops an in-house app they don’t make it work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, they make it work on the OS the company uses, not one they may use 10 years from now. Same way when I develop a web app, I develop it for the tools we’re using.

Btw, I never thought IE was dead.

Finally, I’d just like to once again comment on the "IE stole this from Firefox" comments again. THANK GOD! Imagine what your car would be like if it hadn’t "stolen" the idea of brakes from the first guy to invent it. Basically what your saying is, if Firefox has it, IE never should. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Good ideas should appear in all browser. I’ve yet to hear anyone on here saying how Firefox stole the info bar idea from IE6 SP2, but guess what, they did! Who cares! It does what it should do, that’s all that matters. I couldn’t care less who invented what feature, all I care is that my browser has it.

when is IE going to be more compliant with web standards? i would rather the browser be uglier at this point but have it work correctly with web sites. maybe i’m wrong, i’m not a programmer, but making something that works seems like it should one of the first items. every single website i do looks and works fine in: firefox, netscape, safari, flock, icab, shiira, and camino, then along comes IE and its fix it for IE and break it for everything else.

@The View Master – I didn’t see any problems with Full Screen on my computer with IE7b3, it all works perfectly, the only thing that didn’t autohide was the status bar, however, everything looked all clean and in working order."

Ray, Pardner!

You Are Obiviously NOT a "Full Screen" Navigator Or, You Would Know That, "Full Screen" Navigation In IE7 Beta 3 Is "BROKEN"! …As Compared To "Full Screen" Navigation In IE6, (Which NEVER Requires BREAKING "Full Screen" Navigation In Order To Navigate Windows, …"Full Screen")! …NEVER!!!

Meaning That, A Whole Layer of EXTRA Clicks Has Been ADDED To "Full Screen" Navigation In IE7 Beta 3, Compared To IE6!!!

You know.. With the current push across all markets and industries for Unified tools (even microsoft with the Unified communications push), it is hard to imagine that the file-handling functionality of IE is actually being removed. This seems like a waste of time to me.

Here’s some math for you.. 5000 IT employees from random companies, all of which spend an extra 3 seconds 10 times per day opening HTML view and selecting to open in Windows Explorer.. Kind of silly to split it, if you ask me. With multiple tools, it could add up to 20 seconds to the process of getting these jobs done not (not even factoring in the time to find what your doing amongst all of the open applications on your machine). Think of all of the dollars lost, worldwide.. It’s almost things are moving backwords..

Now.. With a NEW version, why is functionality LOST? In Vista, will the integration be smoother?

In an earlier post, someone went through what could be a 3-hour process to restore the Folder view capability.. I don’t accept the "?Something? was lost in version change" description. More like, "something in the MS app installer screwed up my OS and they need to create a fix, or give me a list of files to confirm and registry keys to check to get this thing working again.." I’m tempted to just start pushing everyone I know to switch to linux/firefox/open office.. At least then there are no "mystery" changes.. And although there is no microsoft support for their filetypes, there is at least support on the other end for Microsoft files.

But.. I like all of my microsoft applications, so I’ll try to stick it out and even continue to download beta versions of software when available. I just wish the changes seemed more productive and less silly, with a little less mystery on the user end.

I agree.. Linux is a pain. The first 15 times I installed it I ran into issues, but with most distros the installation package can be more hands-free than windows nowadays. Unless you require any custom-considerations on your box like vnc, dhcp, etc, you don’t need to even edit any .conf files or reconfigure user accounts (which is where most of the issues are at).. And once familiar with loading an RPM or running a makefile it’s pretty simple. The difference between services and daemons is minor now (except that they are still more powerful and controllable under *nix).. But, if you can tell me a good way to grep through PIDs (like with ps aux | grep "string") in windows without any addons I’d sure like to hear it.. Or through a default installation be able to provide 100% server or workstation administration through telnet or SSH seamlessly, with NO additional configuration I’d sure like to hear that one, too.. Fact is, it’s just as user-friendly for novices now (it is 2006, afterall) as windows is, but it didn’t forget about the people that know what the hell they are doing.

I mean.. If someone is looking to have a fancy address book and play solitare seemlessly in a process intensive environment, windows is great.. But I’ve seen a lot more data center crashes related to windows OS issues than *nix..

With that said, I still agree with you.. but my point is that for almost everyone I know on beta 3, the Windows Explorer FTP view does not work after changing from beta 2 to beta 3. You cannot just "explore" it like you stated above.. It’s broken by the install process.. And if I had the time and energy to reload my entire OS just to reload beta 3, I would. It’s not like I can just go out and reinstall the previous RPM.. Or re-run the makefile.. The only fix anyone knows of is to run the repair installation from the CD, reload all patches, then go directly from IE6 to IE7 b 3 (unless you were lucky enough to create a restore point).

And many people still use http://FTP.. If you can tell me how to have a central data repository, across multiple departments, across multiple locations, across multiple operating systems, multiple networks, multiple locales, cost-effectively, from a single link, WITHOUT http://FTP.. Then I’d sure like to know that trick.. And I’m sure a lot of people would agree with me on that one.

the busy hour glass is displayed when pointing mouse toward the status bar while the webpage is loading it can be annoying if you want to select menu for security setting. menu option is still available even when the pop-up blocker icon and antiphishing icon is not displayed.

for future updates you might want to consider adding this features:

ability to drag and drop on instant search search box or highlight words on webpage, right click and select search.

Why on earth are the Stop & Refresh buttons moved away from the main icon group, and even worse, made smaller than them? It’s poor for overall usability as they aren’t easy to locate quickly. It’s made even worse if you use add-on toolbars or choose to display the ‘classic’ menu bar.

At some point in Beta 2, the RSS functionality totally stopped working and it continues not to work. IE just forgot how to deal with RSS both with the feed detection icon and feeds already added. It usually just displays the XML code. I put this in Connect awhile back, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas.

That’s a nice list of minor improvements, but the first thing that I noticed was that my biggest UI complaint from B2 is still present. (and not only still present but it seems to have gotten worse.)

So it seems Microsoft has decided to abandon the traditional menus and buttons for, uh, "menu buttons", that are, well, menus… that look like buttons. OK, that’s… nice. I suppose. (I understand this is going to be the new Micrsoft standard UI. As you can tell, I can hardly contain my glee.)

But, why, for the love of [insert preferrred deity] are the menus sharing the same row as the tabs? And, (I am guessing from the comments- I haven’t actually tried beta 3 yet) not movable, as well. Glad to see that IE has finally gotten on the bandwagon with tab support, but why cripple them like this? With all the buttons that are sharing the tab bar with the tabs, you have room for, what, three tabs? Four? Sure you could fit more, but if you have more than a few tabs open, it’s often nice to actually be able to read the titles on them, you know.

This is even worse than IE6 shoving the "Links" toolbar off into the corner by default. At least then you could move it to a usable location. Up until now I had assumed that the UI of Beta 2 was so awful because the developers were focusing on standards support and security features first and would clean up the UI later. I have to say it’s a little surprising to see that this was the intended UI all along. I know Microsoft have never been the greatest at designing useable interfaces, but even that statement seems generous when looking at these screenshots.

On the other hand, I am at least happy to hear that you are not entertaining the idea of combining the Stop and Refresh button into one. I guess things could always be worse. (Kind of in a weird spot, though aren’t they?)

again website icon on address bar, tabs, favorite, history, is not showing at all. I’m stuck with Internet Explorer icon. I see the website icon on temporary internet files but they are not displayed on favorite, address bar, tabs.

-favorites -> can’t click the OK or DELETE button when i try to delete a link

-menu bar -> just put it on the top and stop being new UI enthusiasts when the new UI is worse than the old one.

PUT IT BACK PUT IT BACK JUST PUT IT BACK NOW.

-icons and everything…it all looks like it was done in a rush just for the buttons to have functions…the UI is ugly and i think you know this by now…so i’m expecting the final version to look A LOT different and there4 a lot better.

popup blocker….how bloody hard is it for you guys to know when the popup is a window the user doesn’t want to see?

you go on a page and a popup opens when u click a link and it’s the only action initiated by the link -> THAT POPUP IS GOOD.

u click a link it opens another page BUT also loads a popup -> THAT POPUP IS BAD…EVERYTIME nobody should even think of implementing such popups on a page.BLOCK IT BLOCK IT BLOCK IT.

Any popup that tries to mask itself as an url in the status bar by faking an actual link -> BAD.

and if you implement those 3 things…plus ofcourse blocking any onload popups -> those are always bad no matter what the designer had in mind…

anyway if you fix those things u just solved 99% of the popup invasion cases.

Just get it done or stop working on ie permanately.

Activex…move your mouse over to activate this control…nobody cares if you lost a case in court.NOBODY.just fix it…even if it means putting custom javascript code in the actual html(like u expect the web page designers to do since you screwed up) to fix the problem.Or release a plugin which does that.Don’t wait for people to do it.U DO IT.

Open tabs on next run -> haven’t found this option just gonna asume it’s there…if it isn’t GET IT IN THERE.

oh and last…AGAIN…PUT THE MENUBAR WHERE IT BELONGS **!*"!*"?$#"?#$$*#*#!

>Popup Blocker: This is a very very hard problem, whether you believe it or not.<

It’s not rocket science, it’s your browser, which you should know like the back of your hand.

There have been probably hundreds of comments at least on the horrible UI yet we’re supposed to believe it’s "very very hard" to fix it? Some of the most useful features were in IE6 yet you took them out. Why?

Full screen mode is a mess, why even bother going into it, or is that your intention, to discourage users from hitting the F11 key? Where is the menu bar in full screen, why did you remove autohide of the Windows taskbar and the favorites folder on the left side screen? Who wants to keep switching back and forth just to do the basics?

It makes no sense but I suppose it’s all too "very very hard". Sorry to make a joke of it but that’s what your browser is becoming. It may be free but there’s still millions of dollars involved from a business standpoint and Microsoft is going to lose that if you keep ignoring what users are trying to tell you, the UI needs work. Not in 10 years but now.

Please could you simply base your browser on Opera. Opera with wider support would be the best browser, it has every feature IE has and more> RSS feeds, built in bittorrent support, tab preview pains, mouse gestures, ability to close tabs without focusing them and is the faster than IE & FF.

If it wasn’t for the fact that so many websites require IE I would simply use just Opera. Actually that is not strictly speak true, there is a great java debugger plug-in for Firefox which is necessary for work but for general browsing Opera is much better.

I noticed someones comment on IE 7 b3 being faster than Firefox. My experience is the exact opposite with Opera 9 followed by Firefox followed by IE7 B3 and the speed different is very significant. It is very noticeable on my Pentium Duo and Althon64 and these are not slow machines.

I second the UI thing. Office 2007 looks great, so does Vista, MSN Live also, …then IE7 is actually a contender for looking worse than IE6 I really think you should consider redseigning the tab bar!

@Jerry – I just got a brand new computer that I wiped clean because of all the crap that comes pre-installed and started with a fresh xp pro os (a completely legal version). I then updated windows with all the appropriate patches. Once there were no more patches to be found, I installed IE7 Beta 3. I tried to ftp to my website to update a few pages and I got the same response – "This ftp site cannot be viewed in Windows Explorer". Starting from scratch clearly doesn’t work. From what I have read in other forums, it works much how its supposed to with XP home Although I think its a bit hackish to type in the ftp site in windows explorer, which pop’s up ie7, through which I would then have to select the option to view in Windows Explorer.

It happens not just on some transparent PNG files, but on EVERY PNG file. It can be a painful obstacle at webdesign that PNG files do not look like they should. Personally I think it’s a worse problem then the lack of support for transparency was in IE6.

I expected that folks are going to take my words out of context, but I never said anything about rocket science.

Blocking popups is basically an arms race. It’s really easy to simply block all popups (one line of code) but then you break compatibility. Enabling a single popup for a user-initiated action is fairly straightforward, but then that’s abused by pages that simply throw an invisible layer over all the content, so that if you click in the page at all, a popup comes up.

I’ve got 2 Windows x64 Professional Machines here where FTP is broken after installing Beta 3. Comes up with the "This FTP Site Cannot Be Viewed in Windows Explorer" message when I try to view a page in Windows Explorer.

In Beta 1 and Beta 2, when opening a folder of links in the favorites center, then opening another folder, the first folder would automatically close. In beta 3, if you click a second, third or fourth etc. folder they all remain open (expanded). Is this a new design? It was much better, in my opinion, the old way.

Now I have to scroll or click the folder I do not want expanded any longer a second time.

I love all the other improvements that have been made, keep up the great work!

I get standard windows message dialogue box. On the title bar of the dialog box complete path of the file (like C:Program FilesIBM ThinkVantageCommonLoggerlogmon.exe) is mentioned and in the message area it shows;

‘Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.’

The same message comes for all the files and these messages keep on coming on the screen till the windows loads completely.

Error message for reg.exe comes twice and for xcopy.exe it comes around 20 times. For logmon.exe & br_funcs.exe it comes only once.

What is more surprising that all these error messages come only when I start or restart my machine?

While using IET beta 3 or other application no error message is coming.

If I switch to IE 7 beta2 of IE 6 without changing anything else then these error messages are coming.

@Arvind: Did you ensure that the "C:Program FilesIBM ThinkVantageCommonLogger" folder exists? When you open that folder in Explorer, are you able to run the Logmon tool inside it? Are you using an English operating system?

@Arvind: Did you ensure that the "C:Program FilesIBM ThinkVantageCommonLogger" folder exists? When you open that folder in Explorer, are you able to run the Logmon tool inside it? Are you using an English operating system?

UX improvements are great, but there’s just one thing that’s niggling me: the scrollbar doesn’t extend to the absolute right of the page. There’s 1 pixel or so that’s not covered at the extreme end and so I can’t just move my cursor to the right and scroll up/down without looking at the scrollbar. This behaviour is default on both Firefox and Opera; you might want to look into it.

yes "active tab" is more obvious in Beta 3 if you have few tabs open but when you have 9-12 tab open it’s completely different.

the arrow tab that scroll the tabs sideway is really awful barely notice it. maybe you should put green or red arrow colors instead of black and make it bold.

you should also make the "drop down arrow" next to the quick tabs available when user turn off the quick tabs it’s far better than the left or right arrow that scroll tabs.

When 9 tabs is open.

1. quick tabs sometimes is not changing the thumbnail image to a smaller size making me scroll down just to see the thumbnail and also sometimes its show only 2 columns and a empty space next to it instead of 3 columns

2. when reordering tabs it will make the thumbnail on quicktabs really small even with 2 tabs or 4 tabs or 9 tabs.

@Computronium: You’re right, of course, about how Fitt’s Law applies to scrollbars, and the current IE7 layout doesn’t take advantage of this. To be fair, most folks are using scrollwheels these days, but I agree that it would be an improvement to move the scrollbar all the way to the right of the maximized window.

Opera 9.0 and FireFox Bon Echo 2.0a1 also seem to have this problem. What versions are you using that don’t have this problem?

i just fixed the problem. i had the same problem. it all started with the system migration assistant from lenovo. the smasetup.msi coudnt be found. so i tried to install the newest version. but install shield gave an error to. so i followed (almost) those instruction (i deleted the whole driver folder). then the sma installation worked fine. then i uninstalled ie7 beta 3 from "add and remove programms" and everything worked fine. i bet, if i would install ie7 now again, it would just work fine.

I’m using Opera 9.01 build 9518 and Firefox 1.5.0.4. Haven’t used Firefox 2.0, so I don’t know how the scrollbars work.

I think I sort of found out what the problem was: I wasn’t using default themes for Opera and Firefox so the scrollbars weren’t the default Windows ones. When I used the default themes, Opera and Firefox did indeed have this problem.

Curiously, Windows Explorer does not display this problem even though, obviously, the scrollbars are the usual Windows type.

First of all, I’d just like to say thanks to Eric for your reply to my earlier points. I do now see what you’ve done with the "active tab" in terms of making it more visible – it’s a little more subtle than I would have imagined (possibly just me there – not sure if it was more noticeable to others, but hey), but I do definitely do see it now. One final point on this, which I’ve only just thought of – is there anyway to increase the visibility of thumbnail image of the webpage your on in the ‘quick tabs’, so that that becomes more noticeable without having to refer to the toolbar. In addition, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I also think that it would be a great help if you numbered the thumbnail images, would make them easier to track.

I’m also including a link to a site that talks about your phishing filter (which is also where I got the idea about that specific message – and why it is potentially so dangerous in its current form, given how as the article points out, the filter is far from 100% perfect). It also makes a couple of points on the general usability, which I hope you guys might find useful: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/blog.asp?blogid=22&postid=661

Here are also some other things that I’ve just thought of/noticed:

1. When you right click on a tab on the toolbar, I’ve found that the menu it brings up is a little counter-intuitive in terms of its layout. It’s just that I would have expected the ‘close’ options to be at the bottom, while the ‘new tab’ feature is at the top. Again, this could just be me since I haven’t seen any other mention of it, but the layout I’ve just mentioned does just feel more logical than the current setup.

2. If you really aren’t going to integrate the ‘find’ facility into the search box (at least not immediately), it would be really convenient if you could allow it to ‘remember’ the stuff you’ve already typed into it – at least the stuff from your current browsing session. If this feature is already here and I’ve just missed it, then I apologise.

3. I also notice that there is still no centralised positioning for things like the ‘options’ screen, along with some of the others. Will this be sorted out in the final/next version?

On the plus side, I at least note that the ‘find’ option has been moved down slightly, so that it’s no longer blocking the search bar – although I would still prefer it to be central though.

Did you got an error message from smasetup.msi while installing the IE7? I had the exactly same problem. On my machine (IBM t42) the system migration assistant coudnt find the smasetup.msi while installation. since then i have a lot of error messages that pop up when i start the computer, telling me i dont have any permissions to the paths and exes.

Try to install the smasetup.exe new (download newest version free from lenovo site)! deinstall IE7 and reinstall IE7.

@Serious Sam: Yup, we saw the blog you’re referring to and we’ve already responded to the author. Thanks.

I think the intent of the ordering in the context menu is that the most context-sensitive options (e.g. that which applies to the current tab) is at the top and the options that least apply (e.g. new tab) are at the bottom. I can see arguments for either way though.

I’m not sure I understand when you say that you want it "central"? The positioning of the search box is intended to minimize blocking the text of the page. I’m afraid we won’t be able to keep history for the Find-on-page dialog– as we’ve said before, we’re planning significant improvements for this feature in the next version.

I have seen a few comments about the missing Image Toolbar but I havent seen any word on if this feature will be put back or not. As another person said, the image toolbar could be disabled in IE6. If you didnt like it, you could turn it off. In my conversations with people, a lot of them are very upset that it is gone. Sometimes right clicking is not an option on some pages for a variety of reasons. When it is allowed, the image toolbar saved graphics people like myself tons of time because of fewer clicks. Just recently I was given a url that contained over 70 photos of a house and property for sale. I used image toolbar to make quick work of saving them to a burned CD for a realestate agent. What a hassle and time consuming process that would have been to go through the right click process on all of those photos. With more and more people using digital cameras and sharing digital photos on the internet, I feel that having that Image Toolbar with the ability to quickly save, print, and email photos is very important.

@Brian: I’ve responded to each comment about the image toolbar… I’m sorry to say that no, it is not coming back for IE7; the code was completely removed.

You can still execute all of the functions of the old toolbar by right-clicking on the image; the image toolbar wouldn’t really save you very many clicks. (You could also drag and drop images from the browser to a folder)

If you find you often need to save a ton of images in a hurry, simply run Fiddler (www.fiddlertool.com). Navigate to each image, and when you’re done, sort the session list in Fiddler by download size. Use the mouse to multi-select all of the files you care about, and then save them all to a folder in one click. Voila.

After searching the Symantec Database, I tried re-installing the MS Scripting Host 5.6 but that didn’t solve the problem. I tried de-installing and re-installing NIS but that also didn’t work. The AntiSpam section of NIS shows all parts in the status of "Refreshing" but it seems to be stuck there. Does anyone know of a possible solution?